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Comment by Ozarkian | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the barrier to entry to producing ARM processors isn't that high. ARM will allow anyone who is paying the licensing fee to become a licensee, and then you can build at TSMC or Globalfoundries or any other fab that will take you.

Intel can't compete in that market. The margins are too low: they're organized and staffed to a higher margin business. They're used to the high operating margins of x86. Now that their competition (mainly AMD) has become competent in the past ten years and x86 is decreasing in importance, they're losing their main competitive advantage.

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> The margins are too low: they're organized and staffed to a higher margin business.

Intel has a massive fab capacity problem right now, in that their fabs aren't being utilized. Doing manufacturing of a high-volume product is exactly what they need, and if that high volume product is their own - all the better.

Intel has a massive fab capacity problem because their fabs are too retarded[1] now even for themselves[2], let alone others in the market.

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard

[2]: https://www.techpowerup.com/323700/tsmc-begins-3-nm-producti...

What's their way out then? Pray that AMD messes up and stops making competitive chips?

Pay large salaries to the executives and lobby the government for more funding while their competition accelerates away.

What if they used their resources and expertise to push RISC-V into a position that it could compete in the mobile and datacenter markets?

You mean intel? Then they’d be moving into an even lower margin business.

If you mean ARM… then they’d be helping the competition

What would they ever gain by that?

If they can’t build decent x86 chips when they only have a single competitor switching to an inferior architecture (in the sense that it would require massive investment for it to catch up with x86) with no entry barriers for new competitors would be one of the most absurd things they could ever do.

They can do that with ARM as well, the license cost won't bother Intel. The parent argument regarding lack of margins stands.

Actually invest and invest hard in new technologies, cutting off fat and even muscle if that must be done.

There is a reason Intel Foundries is belching red ink while the rest of Intel is getting Gelsinger'ed to stave it.

You joke, but if past is any indicator..

Are there any US fabricators of ARM chips? Any fabricators in any Western nation? If not, Intel could have tapped into the markets for defense and national security.

TI, Microchip, NXP, STMicro, ...

Globalfoundries among others.

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